Substance update?

[Csubstance@aol.com]

3/15/04

Hi, y'all...

I've been busy with a lot of things since we got our butts kicked in the 
Seventh Circuit on the Substance case, and one of them is local politics here in 
Chicago. It's taken me three months to begin to reorganize Substance and work 
with the restrictions of my new union job, but that seems to be on the verge of 
completion as well. So it's not that we've forgotten about ARN, but only that 
other things (and a bit of depression at so big a loss) have factored in.

I thought you'd be interested in the following Washington Post article in the 
candidate we like for U.S. Senate here -- Baarack Obama. 

Although he still has some mainstream Democratic Party notions about NCLB, 
Barack Obama will be light years ahead of most Senators on progressive issues 
that there is no contest. Last Thursday, we had a reception for him at the 
Chicago Teachers Union offices. He's truly one of the good guys.

As to the name "problem" (which everyone around her enjoys), we're spinning 
it the other way. Why be bland when you can have Barack instead. 

After all, Illinois (which is a lot more free than most states at this point 
in history) was where people all the way to the Mason Dixon line learned to 
pronounce "Blagojevich" (Blah Goy Ah Vich, not Blay Goe Jee Veesch) two years 
ago to keep Paul Vallas from becoming Illinois governor. (There is another 
analogy here to that: Gery Chico, who was President of the Chicago School Reform 
Board of Trustees, is one of the other candidates for U.S. Senate here; the 
testocrats try to use their "school reform" media hype to go for higher 
office...)....

We also have a nice picture of Barack with Sam Schmidt, who is looking 
forward to having a little brother in September. 

Anyway, with the Illinois primary tomorrow, thought you might find the 
following article a relevant diversion from straight on testing discussions. Those 
who don't like it that I'm diverting from straightforward testing stuff can 
simply DELETE. 

George Schmidt
Chicago

washingtonpost.com 


A Bright Hope in Illinois 



By Harold Meyerson


Friday, March 12, 2004; Page A23 


You'd think his name alone would keep him from winning: Barack Obama. 

Put an "Obama for Senate" bumper sticker on your car and the dyslexic 

or myopic might just try to punch you out.


Yet, three days ago, in its last preelection poll before Tuesday's 

primary for the open U.S. Senate seat in Illinois, the Chicago Tribune 

reported that Obama, a 42-year-old state senator, had opened a wide 

lead over the six other candidates vying for the Democratic nomination 

to succeed the departing Peter Fitzgerald. Obama was pulling down 33 

percent support, while state Comptroller Daniel Hynes (an organization 

man) was second with 19 percent, and investment banker Blair Hull 

(who's spent at least $29 million of his own money on the race but 

whose campaign has been hurt by accounts of his very messy divorce) 

was in third with 16 percent.


Organization men are a staple of Illinois politics, of course, and 

investment bankers seem poised to take over the Senate in our 

plutocratic age. Obama, by contrast, is a candidate who all but defies 

categorization -- and who would certainly mark a radical departure for 

the stodgy Senate. If elected (and Illinois is a Democratic state 

becoming steadily more so), he would become the Senate's sole black 

member and just the third African American senator since 

Reconstruction, following Massachusetts Republican Edward Brooke and 

fellow Illinois Democrat Carol Moseley Braun, who only narrowly lost 

her seat to Republican Fitzgerald in 1998 despite a string of 

scandals.


But that scarcely begins to describe the distinctiveness of Obama. His 

father was Kenyan, his mother a white girl from Kansas. The two met 

and married at the University of Hawaii in 1960 (when miscegenation 

was still a felony in more than half the states). His father 

disappeared from his life when Obama was 2; his mother raised him in 

Hawaii and Indonesia. Obama went to college at Columbia, then moved to 

Chicago for five years of community organizing in a fusion of civil 

rights crusading and Saul Alinsky house-to-house plodding. He then 

went to Harvard Law School, where he became the first black president 

of the Law Review; returned to Chicago to run a program that 

registered 100,000 voters in the '92 elections, entered a civil rights 

law firm and became a senior lecturer in constitutional law at the 

University of Chicago. (If elected, Obama would be the second liberal 

Hyde Park academic to represent Illinois in the Senate; New Deal 

economist Paul Douglas was the first.)


Seven years ago Obama was elected to the state Senate from a district 

in Chicago's South Side. In Springfield, he developed a reputation as 

an impassioned progressive who was able to get support on both sides 

of the aisle. One of his bills created a state earned-income tax 

credit that has brought more than $100 million to Illinois's 

working-poor families. Another, conceived in the wake of revelations 

about innocent men the state had wrongly executed, mandated the 

videotaping of police interrogations of suspects in capital crimes. 

There followed "tortuous negotiations with state's attorneys and 

death-penalty abolitionists," Obama recalls, but in the end the bill 

passed unanimously.


In October 2002, Obama made an eloquent case against the impending war 

in Iraq at a rally in downtown Chicago. Declaring repeatedly that "I 

don't oppose all wars," he distinguished what he termed "a dumb war, a 

rash war" from a string of just and necessary wars in which the United 

States had engaged. He is surely the progressives' darling in the 

field, drawing enthusiastic support from white Lake Shore liberals as 

well as the African American community. But he's also won the 

endorsements of virtually all the state's major papers, many of which 

-- such as Chicago's Tribune and Sun-Times -- note their disagreement 

with him on the war but hail him as a brilliant public servant 

nonetheless. Should Obama win, says Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Evanston, 

who backs his candidacy, he'd "march right onto the national stage and 

the international stage."


While practicing law in the early 1990s, Obama wrote "Dreams From My 

Father," a memoir and meditation of genuine literary merit that 

depicts his understandable quest for his identity -- a quest that 

immersed him in the world of Chicago's poor and that took him to a 

Kenyan village in search of a father he never knew. It's a story of 

worlds colliding, fusing and redividing, of a life devoted to 

re-creating in a grittier world the idealism and sense of community of 

the early civil rights movement, which provided the backdrop for his 

parents' marriage.


If by "American" we mean that which is most distinctive about us and 

our ideals, if we mean it to refer to our status as a nation of 

immigrants that could yet become the world's first great polyglot, 

miscegenistic meritocracy, then Barack Obama, if elected, would not 

only become the sole African American in the Senate: He would also be 

the most distinctly American of its members.


meyersonh@washpost.com 


© 2004 The Washington Post Company